As a school that made AYP last year, we were one of only 11% in the State. We have made great strides over the past few years but we are always seeking to provide students with more and to insure that all students become proficient in their academics.
Literacy Instruction in Melrose and more particularly, Lincoln Elementary, has evolved greatly in the last 3-4 years. With the adoption of the Harcourt Storytown Balanced Literacy program 4 years ago, our current 3rd grade students will be the first group of students taking the MCAS who have had the benefit of one consistent literacy program. We also shifted our instrucitonal approach to focus on small group explicit instruction, based on the practice of guided reading. These changes required a fair amount of professional development and some time to take hold, but the results have been very positive.
As with any new curriculum adoption, after the initial implementation stages and adjustments, we needed to take a look at the effectiveness of the program and what areas within reading were our students not progressing they way we expected. So last spring we did a series of assessments and we also studied the data from our own district assessments. We initially worked with
Literacy Consultant, Dr. Ilda King, who helped us to determine that we needed to do a better job of teaching our students automaticity with their decoding skills which would then result in better fluency as children reached higher grades. This was going to be a task that required a K-5 effort.
Simultaneously in the spring, a group of teachers, administrators and community members from across the district participated in a grant from the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to develop a Literacy Plan for the district. The group worked with another
Literacy Consultant, Dr. Elissa Arndt, who led us through the process and also introduced us to a book called
Annual Growth for All and Catch Up Growth for Those Who Are Behind. All of this work tied in so well with what we were doing at Lincoln School, that we purchased a copy of the book for every professional at Lincoln and we all read it over the summer. We also met as a staff in July to discuss the book and how it can help us make changes and improve literacy instruction at Lincoln.
A small group from Lincoln (2 teachers, a SPED teacher, a Title I Tutor, the Principal and our Assistant Superintendent for PPS) then spent three days at the
Summer Reading Institute with Sally Grimes where we immererssed oursleves in intensive hours preparing our own Comprehensive Literacy Plan based on a Tiered System of Support for students. While there, we learned that as a school, we were well ahead of most schools in Massachusetts, as far as meeting the needs of students and understanding what it takes structurally and strategically to make it happen.
The result was a plan that included expanded literacy assessment data for all students, progress monitoring for students who were behind, flooding grade levels with intervention staff members during their literacy blocks, providing students who were behind with as much focused instrucion they needed beyond the core literacy block, and frequent highly structured data meetings by teachers. We wanted students to be proficient readers by 3rd grade. In short, we were going to provide students with what they needed, when they needed it, and with the frequency they needed.
Our results have been outstanding thus far. We have continued work with all three literacy consultants and in fact, we invited Sally Grimes to come in December and present to literacy teams from all 5 Elementary buildings which has spurred a movement by the other schools for which we can serve as the learning site. We are also learning from a few schools in MA who have already excelled with this work. The Winthrop Principal, Mary Alise Herrera, and I recently visited the Murkland School in Lowell. The Murkland is a Level 4 school as designated by the DESE, which means they are in need of dramatic improvement based on MCAS scores. This K-4 school with about 380 kids, has a student population that is 90% low income and 60% ELL. Yet, in 1 year of a tiered system of support for both Literacy and Math, they made AYP and had huge improvements in their scores. The state has promoted the Murkland as a model for what the state hopes to help districts implement through their own
model of a tiered system of support. Our visit served as both reassuring that we are on the right path, and informational as we assessed what our next steps should be.
We continue to make tweaks to our system as we reflect and assess our system and our own teaching. However the data tells us that each time we reassess, using measures such as the
DIBELS, the
DRA2 and the Quick Phonics Screener, more and more students are meeting the grade level benchmarks and fewer and fewer are in need of intensive support. While we will always have students who need additional attention and support, our goal is to minimize that and provide appropriate interventions in a timely manner and make sure kids don't fall through the cracks. I look forward to sharing more information as we grow, especially some examples of student growth, but it has been a great start to this process.
